abendstrom

While iPhone is nice as a mere portable internet device, in my opinion, it grandly fails the qualification as a Japanese cell phone, although it has been aggressively marketed in Japan since its introduction in July 2008 (which led me, Tokyoite, to buying it). The most important problem is that mail communication with other Japanese cell phones is not possible in many cases. The Japanese cell mail system is arguably the most frequent application of Japanese cell phones, but cell mailing in Japan is very different from ordinary SMS/MMS's in the rest of the world.

Introduction

In Japan, there is a (high) quasi industry standard of what buyers of a new cell phone expect from their phone in terms of functionality, interface and usability. iPhone is currently the second most expensive telephone available on the Japanese cell phone mass market, marketed aggressively by Softbank, the official carrier and vendor for iPhones in Japan, so you would expect it to fulfill at least the standard customer expectations. In fact, though, iPhone's specifications are so different from of the established phones, that SoftBank has prospective customers sign a 2-page paper on "caution items when purchasing an iPhone". (there is none such caution form for any other phone in Japan)

However, the most crucial differences (and lacks) compared to the established cell phones are not mentioned in that caution form. I had to discover them after the purchase of my iPhone and confirmed them one by one with Apple's Japan iPhone support center as well as with Softbank. As I thought that those points are crucially blocking my use of the iPhone as a normal cell phone, I stated to SoftBank/Apple my opinion that they mislead me into believing that the iPhone can be used like a normal cell phone, which it cannot, and thusly contracts based on this assumption are invalid. I eventually demanded the cancellation of the carrier contract (about 8,000 Yen/month) and the reimbursement for the model (69,120 Yen). While admitting to the iPhone lacks of functionality, they refused my claim and didn't even offer me any other option. All conversation was on telephone, I unfortunately do not have names or anything in written at the moment.

Claims

Some of the "standard" functionality of most japanese cell phones that the iPhone does not provide and that are not mentioned in the caution form either, are:

1. Emails from the iPhone are simply rejected by many other cell phones, including most of my friends. This is much more crucial than in the U.S., for instance, as in Japan, cell phones in private use are primarily used for exchanging emails than for talking to people on the phone (This is partly connected to the fact that Japanese spend a lot of time in public places (trains) where talking on the phone is not allowed)

iPhone does not have an ordinary cell phone mail address like all other cell phones, but it has a new, iPhone specific domain. iPhone mails are not sent from the Softbank (carrier) server, but from a special server set up by Apple Japan.

Here lies the problem: Many users (and many of my friends) have their own cell phones set up so that they only accept mails from other cell phone companies, but not allow mails from normal computer mail servers. This is primarily to prevent spam. Now, while theoretically, I could go around and ask every single friend to reset their settings and include my address in the "allowed" list, this is impracticable in practice, it is a very complicated action, and futile, if I happened to only get the other people's mail address but not their number (which happens often with the iPhone, see claim#2) and thusly cannot inform them about the change in the settings because my mail informing them will be rejected too.

I also talked to the customer support center of docomo, which is the carrier most of my friends are customers of, and asked them if they would change the spam settings in order to include iphone mails. They said no, and told me only to tell all my friends to include my iphone individually in their "no spam"-list.

The fact that I cannot exchange mails with most of my friends makes the iPhone useless for me as a cell phone, so this is the most frustrating lack of functionality for me.

2. Japanese characters sent from the iPhone can arrive as "mojibake" or unreadable garbage texts on other cell phones. This is probably related to the fact that iPhone encodes text in Unicode while ordinary Japanese cell phones only allow for the more simple JIS(?)-encoding system. (Apple does in fact acknowledge in the "caution list"  that "emoji" emoticons cannot be exchanged, but this problem is apparently separate)

This is also the likely reason why the navigation system does not recognize any goal input in Japanese (and not in alphabet letters either, as the geographical data are probably stored only in Japanese characters). Any neighbourhood, famous landmarks or train stations, they are all refuted as "location unknown".

3. iPhone does not have infrared. All modern Japanese cell phones have infrared - Infrared is the most common way to exchange phone number and phone email address with other people, something done in a few seconds and with a few keystrokes. I now have to type the information entirely one by one, first into my phone, then into the other person's phone. Not to mention that the auto-complete system constantly hampers the input by suggesting useless completions while email text strings often have no real meaning. A very tedious action which might take up to several minutes.

4. Telephone history list. iPhone does not indicate whether a call was received or dialed. Also, it is not possible to delete single calls from the history list, only the entire list. All this is possible and very useful with Japanese cell phones.

5. Significantly slow. Opening crucial phone applications like the email folder or the address book only takes fractions of a second on normal Japanese phone. With the iPhone, all applications including those mentioned seem to respond with the same speed, i.e. several seconds. Especially the mail folder sometimes shows up only after 10 seconds or more after pressing the button. This significantly hampers the smooth use of the iPhone as cell phone, where you constantly open and close the main applications.

6. While iPhone has a camera, you can only shoot still photos, not movies. All Japanese cell phones equipped with a camera allow for the shooting of movies, too.

Contact me if you are frustrated too.